Saturday, June 5, 2004

Orlowski: Not content with asking for an arm and a leg from consumers and artists, the music industry now wants your fingerprints, too. [Scripting News] You are in the gym, all sweaty, and try to turn on my music player. Or the sensor gets dirty. Good luck. I'm sure users will be delighted with a consumer device that seems to randomly refuse to operate. Yes, all such detectors must have some non-negligible false negative rate, otherwise their false positive rate will be too high to satisfy the copyright absolutists. Check the ROC curves for automatic classifiers of complex human-generated signals. Furthermore, would I have a music player in my home that my family cannot operate? Would I give up being able to lend a CD to a friend? I grew up in a big city under a fascist dictatorship. Police, uniformed and undercover and informers were everywhere. Street crime levels were extremely low. I could walk home from hanging out with friends at 3am without even thinking of the possibility of being mugged. Then the revolution came, and democracy. Street crime went up. Some people longed for the old regime and its street peace. The RIAA reminds me of them. 7:17:28 PM